Data enhancement is a growing need in today's environments. As the volume of data grows it is harder to identify and classify it because the process is subjective and mainly done by humans. The same data can be classified into many different groups based on its content and many times it is either classified incorrectly or requirements changed and it must be reclassified. To address this time consuming manual task and the growing volumes of data, Technologies have been built that will analyze the data, generate enhancements which are made part of the data and then used in an automated classification process. Additionally these enhancements are also used as part of the data for search engines to improve the accuracy of the search engine's results. However, integrating one Technology into one or more Data Sources is a very hard task and almost impossible due to the incompatibility and restrictions between Technologies and Data Sources. It is even harder and very expensive to integrate multiple Technologies with multiple Data Sources.
Information Management, Document Management, and Enterprise Content Management Systems as well as other computer software application (“Software Application” or “Software Applications”) environments enforce numerous access restrictions within their software. This is particularly true in the new Cloud Computing Environments (“The Cloud”) where these restrictions are more prevalent.
Data Source restrictions limit the access and update capabilities that Technologies, wishing to work within the Data Source, have to the data stored in these Data Sources. This situation causes these Technologies to be limited in their use to data stored in Data Sources not enforcing the restrictions. In these cases the organization will not be able to use these Technologies due to the restrictions placed by the Data Source. Therefore this requirement negatively affects both vendors of the Technologies and customers with data in Data Sources.
While organizations attempt to address Data Source restrictions, flexibility for change and simultaneous integration to multiple Technologies and Data Sources is not taken into account by the organizations. These systems continue to be dependent and focus on the needs that are in place within organization and are specific to those organizations. Since modifications made by organizations to these Technologies are specific to their Data Source and the modifications are made on a customer by customer basis, currently existing methods are unable to augment data in way that avoids the pitfalls that arise from these modifications.
In summary, for security and stability reasons, Data Sources make it very hard for Technologies to integrate with them while at the same time there is a growing need in the market to automatically augment data using these Technologies. Therefore there is a need in the market for implementing methods that (a) are simple, scalable, and easy for organizations and individuals to install, configure and integrate into their computing environment, (b) provide unrestricted access to Data Sources regardless of its storage location and (c) provide enhancement and augmentation of the data with any Technology. These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be explained and will become obvious to one skilled in the art through the summary of the invention that follows.